The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [52]
“Tony, come on. If I don’t believe in UFOs, there’s no way you’re gonna get me going about demons.”
“Who, me? I’m just a deal maker. I’m not a creative. I’m just a glorified hustler.”
Van laughed. “Tony, buck up. You do okay, man. You do great.” Maybe Tony had suffered some market setbacks, but the guy had a private jet. He dated models and actresses. He spent enough on his clothes to feed a village in Kenya. Why was he carrying on like his world had ended?
And yet, Tony had always been like this. It was the other side of his charm somehow, that dark urge to put himself down.
Tony rubbed at his cheeks, the way he did as his face went numb from drink. “I do assemble my deals in rather remarkable ways, sometimes. Through pastiche and collage, basically. It’s very postmodern.”
“‘Postmodern’? You’re drunk, Tony, cut the crap.” Van rose to his feet. “You know what we should do right now? Bowling. Let’s go bowling, Tony, come on.”
Tony smiled. “You’re still bowling? You’re gonna kick my ass, man.”
“No way, Tony. You are the bowler. You are Mr. Ace the Split.”
“Look at your damn arms,” Tony objected. “What have you been doing to yourself? You’ve got arms like two tree trunks.”
“Two tree trunks,” Van repeated carefully. As a child with a stutter, he would have found those words impossible to say. They were pretty hard for him to say right now, with that brandy hanging on his tongue. “Let’s go bowl in the Pentagon. They’ve got some great lanes in there. I’ve got a Pentagon pass card.”
“Now you’re starting to interest me,” Tony said.
“The Pentagon is full of hot chicks.”
“You are plastered,” Tony realized. “Did you eat anything today?”
Van shrugged. “Let’s just go. This place stinks. Lemme call my limo guy.”
“Never mind that, I’ve got a chauffeur,” said Tony. He helped Van into his overcoat. The coat was West German military surplus. It was slick green nylon with elastic cuffs, some kind of a European battlefield medical thing. The coat had the many pockets Van always needed for tools, gizmos, and spare bits of hardware, even though it made him look like a secret mad surgeon. Normal people skittered away when they saw him on the sidewalks of Washington. This was one of the coat’s major benefits, actually.
Plus, the coat was warm, and it was cold outside.
On his way out the door, Tony noticed the ray gun. He snagged it from its holster on the wall.
He sniffed the barrel. “This is a hot-glue gun.”
“Yeah,” said Van.
Tony rapped the hollow barrel with his knuckles. “So, you’ve got a Flash Gordon ray gun that melts glue? What is this, aluminum?”
“Titanium.”
“I thought that was titanium. But, man, nobody can machine titanium. Even Steve Jobs can’t machine titanium. Where on earth did you get this thing? It’s insanely great!”
“I keep it to scare off the crack pushers.”
Tony reverently wrapped the electrical wire around the glue gun’s butt. “You wouldn’t believe what I went through at the FCC today,” he said. “It was truly awful. It was bloody blue ruin. But this thing, Van.” He burst into whoops of laughter as he put the gun back in the wall holster. “You, my man. You have just made my year!”
Tony really did have a chauffeur, and he really did have a bodyguard. They were two dark, gloomy men with a silent, rent-a-cop, paid-by-the-hour look. They sat in the front of the limo, while Tony and Van sat together in the plush, upholstered back.
It had always been their principle never to mix liquor, so Tony opened the limo’s bar to retrieve some Courvoisier. The bar supplied them with nifty little translucent green shot glasses.
Van downed his shot. This brandy was not just good, but superbly good. It was soul-stirring. It gave him just the jolt he needed to get to the point.
“Tony, why did you come to see me tonight?”
Tony